A member of the Presidential Human Rights Council has suggested a code of behavior and ethics for activists. The official says the move would sift out attention seekers with political ambitions, such as the members of the band Pussy Riot.

Vladimir Osechkin, who also heads the State Duma workgroup for
public control over prisons and the protection of inmates’ rights
told reporters that he had suggested the official bodies hold a
joint session in February and discuss the adoption of what he
called “a rights activist ethics code.”

In an interview with the Izvestia daily Osechkin said that lately
a lot of people started to ‘parasitize’ on human rights. These
people use the status of rights campaigners for self-promotion
and do not protect anyone’s interests but their own, he noted.
Such behavior leads to a situation where law enforcers and other
agencies become prejudiced against the human rights community as
a whole, and all rights campaigners face difficulties in their
work.

“We should not be afraid to openly talk about problems,
including the violations committed by representatives of policing
agencies, but we should not politicize the process,”
Osechkin told the newspaper. There must be a single choice option
– people should work either in the political arena or in the area
of Human Rights, he emphasized.

Osechkin gave several examples of the people who, in his view
were discrediting the status of the rights advocates and were
pursuing own goals. These included the former Lower House MP
Gennadiy Gudkov, who promised to set up his own HR group when
parliament voted to oust him, but quickly abandoned the idea.

Another example was Moscow artist Ilya Farber – the man who was
sentenced to a lengthy prison term for bribery, but had the
sentence reviewed after a
public outcry over the irregularities uncovered in the
process. Farber was released under the recent amnesty and
pledged to devote himself to human rights activities, but instead
he immediately sparked a scandal by ‘symbolically’ walking over
stars from officers’ shoulder patches (the artist explained that
this meant his triumph over unjust prosecutors).

The third and probably most well known example of attention
seekers discrediting rights activists were the members of the
Pussy Riot
punk band. Osechkin said that the girls who now intended to
work on defending the interests of inmates as well as a broader
rights agenda became known through an act that insulted the
feelings of Orthodox Christians, and even before that staged
obscene acts in public places and posted their photos on the
internet.

In an interview with the Moscovsky Komsomolets newspaper Osechkin
claimed that he had received a lot of letters from people across
Russia expressing their concern over the plans of Farber and the
Pussy Riot members to devote themselves to rights activism.

Some legislators and members of Presidential Rights Council have
supported the idea. MP Mikhail Bryachak (Fair Russia) told
reporters that often rights advocates were caring only about
their own well-being and not about the declared objectives. MP
Vadim Dengin (LDPR) said that the people whose reputation was
stained by immoral actions and who had insulted other people with
their actions could not call themselves rights advocates. “If
such people tell us what we should do they would lead the nation
into a disaster,” the parliamentarian added.

Andrey Yurov of the presidential council said that it would be
helpful to introduce some rules, but they could only be
recommendations. “The UN declaration on protection of human
rights campaigners reads that any person has the right to protect
his own or others’ rights. Therefore we cannot impose any bans
here,” he stated.

At the same time, the head of the council, Mikhail Fedotov,
harshly opposed the initiative saying that he considered both the
ethics code and its discussion senseless. “Ethics cannot be
born from orders or directives, from someone’s decision or
initiative. Professional ethics is born from experience and
develops by self-regulation,” the official stated.